What does White Hat SEO mean?

What does White Hat SEO mean?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has had a mystical quality about it for years. You want to be in the number 1 slot on Google for your selected keyword(s). So if you are selling/advertising Flats in Luxor, what you want is every time someone types “Flats in Luxor”, into Google is for your website to be first on the list. So how do you do this?

In the bad old days people would cheat, they would put white text on a white background, mention the keywords over and over. Or they would put the keyword all over the meta data. Google got wise to this. First of all they ignored these tricks and now they have started penalising sites that use them and giving them negative scores.

Content in king.

You want your content to mention the keywords, not too many times, that also gets penalised. If your domain name contains the keyword that really helps. This is called white hat SEO. Being a good guy. Also if Google starts penalising sites for another trick, it doesn’t affect your site because you didn’t use any tricks.

I had a charity approach me wanting a new website because their website wasn’t hitting the search engines. It was a breast cancer support charity and on their website they constantly used an abbreviation BCSC when talking about their work. I suggested they use Breast Cancer Survival Center (BCSC) instead because nobody is going to search on BCSC. They did not need a new site, they just needed new content (which they could do themselves). Simple changes like that make a huge difference to your ranking

There are tools that help, Google can tell you what search strings are commonly used(keyword analysis) and a plugin like Yoast will analyse your content to make sure it is making efficient use of keywords.

So when doing Search Engine Optimisation(SEO), wear your white hat

PS there is loads of information about white hat SEO on the internet, just Google it 🙂